Mesmerised by the macabre

Charles Spencer felt as though he had entered a Harry Potter-like parallel universe when he discovered the Grant Museum of Zoology

By Charles Spencer
9:58AM BST 11 Apr 2011

There are blessed moments of wonder in life when you seem to have relinquished the humdrum world of poor harassed Muggles and entered a Harry Potter-like parallel universe.

Paxman’s in Union Street, south London, a basement shop entirely devoted to the sale, repair and maintenance of French horns, offers one such experience. This splendid establishment would seem quite at home in JK Rowling’s Diagon Alley.

Even more weird and wonderful, however, is the Grant Museum of Zoology, which I have only just discovered and which seems to have arrived in Bloomsbury direct from Hogwarts. It is one of the most delightful, quirky and at times downright revolting collections I have ever encountered, a gigantic cabinet of curiosities housed in a high-ceilinged former medical library that is part of the UCL complex of buildings.

The museum, new to these atmospheric premises in University Street, was founded by Robert Edmond Grant in 1827.

He was appointed to the first chair of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in Britain at the newly established University of London (later UCL) and was an early mentor of Charles Darwin. The museum began as he assembled teaching materials for his students, and many others have been added to the collection over the years.

The place is now packed to the gunwales with animal skeletons, stuffed wildlife and all kinds of scary-looking specimens in preserving jars. Some of them are not for the faint-hearted. Many feature creatures that have been bisected to reveal the brain and innards. Look at one side of a glass case and you will see a delightful tabby cat; look at the other and you will be treated to every detail of its inner workings.

There is also a display of parasitic worms, with the even more disconcerting information in the guidebook that tapeworms have been known to reach a length of 40 feet in the human gut.

The curators seem to relish black humour. As you enter you notice that a group of human skeletons are looking down at you from the high balcony that runs round the exhibition space. And a cluster of turtles have been diagonally arranged on a wall like the flying ducks on Hilda Ogden’s “muriel” in Coronation Street.

Look out, too, for what looks like a gigantic sweet jar filled with dozens of tiny moles, their noses and paws still pink as the day they were pickled.

This creepy but beautiful museum – the skeleton of a 17ft anaconda resembles an extraordinarily intricate sculpture and many of the exhibits bring the work of Damien Hirst to mind – would make a superb setting for a piece of site-specific theatre. The Punchdrunk company, recently awarded a whopping increase in its Arts Council grant, should check it out urgently. And anyone with a taste for the macabre, the bizarre or just an interest in natural history will be spellbound. God’s universe rarely seems stranger or more varied than it does here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/charlesspencer/8442391/Mesmerised-by-the-macabre.html